The Death House

by Sarah Pinborough

  For our families, at least.

  Three

  After breakfast there are lessons. We have these in dorm groups and the teachers rotate around the various rooms that might once have been bedrooms or dining rooms or whatever else someone filled this old house with, but now serve as small classrooms. Even though some of the dorms are down to just a couple of people, they don’t change that rigid routine by mixing us up.

  Mainly, given the age differences between us, we work from textbooks, answering comprehension questions or learning French we’ll never use or just staring out of the window and waiting for the next change of teacher. There’s a ten-minute break but no playground to dick around in. It’s basically just a toilet break. There’s no detention. If you don’t work and just sit there quietly the teachers don’t care. It turns out that you end up working anyway, just to make the morning pass quicker. Four hours is a long time to just sit and think, especially when you don’t have any good stuff to think about.

  The teachers are all middle-aged and I wonder about that. Maybe it makes it easier for them to distance themselves from us. We don’t know their names – just call me Sir or Miss should you need help – and I think they must be as bored as we are. They sit at the front and watch us until we have a question, but mainly if we don’t understand something we just move on to the next bit. Or, in our dorm, ask Louis. The textbooks we use are old, maybe twenty or thirty years older than the ones at school, and I think that’s intentional, too. It’s school but not school. Like this whole place is life but not life. At least the teachers, who disappear off to their own wing once lessons are done, will get out of here. Sometimes I’ll catch one watching us as we work as if we’re animals in a zoo. I can never decide quite what the look is. Fascination or fear, or maybe a bit of both. They watch for symptoms, too, I bet. Just like the nurses. I wonder if the teachers talk about us at night. I wonder if they take bets on which of us will go next – or say which one of us they want to go next. I think about rolling up balls of paper and launching them across the room to see if I can hit Ashley’s head, but I never do it. Aside from my lack of interest in mucking around here, I suspect that messing about in class is a sure-fire way to get Matron’s attention. I don’t want to be a troublemaker. I don’t want her noticing me. Instead, I scratch answers onto paper and sit the morning out.

  The sunshine is gone by the time we finish lunch and scurry away like rats in drains through the vast corridors of the house, and by two, rain is falling in sheets from the heavy grey sky outside. It’s not cold but it’s rained for days. Not that I feel much like going outside. I’m tired.

  Will and Louis are set up at a small table in the corner of the common room that no one really uses, the plastic chess pieces laid out between them. Louis is carefully explaining how each one moves and Will already looks confused. The common room is a strange affair, out of time, just like the rest of the house. There are shelves of board games in battered boxes and an old record player on the side, but the music is unfamiliar and who knows how to use a record player, anyway? Although there are only four or five kids in the room with them, neither Louis or Will glance towards me as I pause at the door. This isn’t a surprise. When Louis engages in something, it absorbs his whole attention. We might not have known each other very long, but we’re getting to know each other well.

  In the library, Eleanor is curled up next to a radiator with a book, ignored by the two boys playing cards cross-legged on the floor. It’s a thin paperback with a colourful cover and yellowed pages and she pulls at a strand of her hair as she reads, lost in whatever world is coming alive on the paper. I think about taking a book, but nothing grabs my attention. I didn’t read much before – not even for school – and now it just looks like hard work. Plus I don’t want to read about things I’ll never do. It’ll just make the dark ball in my stomach grow.

  Ashley is in the art room, labouring over a sheet of buff A1 paper like they use in primary schools, a selection of coloured markers beside him. Harriet is working on a painting of an empty vase that she’s set up on a table with some books around it. Her tongue sticks out as she concentrates on bringing it to life, adding imagined brightly coloured flowers springing from the gaping china. Ashley glances over and nods seriously at me, and I wonder what he’s up to. Whatever it is, I think he should let Harriet finish it for him. Her painting is quite good. I leave them to it.

  I stand in a corridor for a while, leaning on the chipped paint of the windowsill and looking out at the rain. The house gardens are empty. The old oak tree at its heart is still. There’s no wind, no movement in its leaves and branches, as if it’s simply staring back at me and waiting for something. In the quiet I can hear my heart beating, punching out angry not-quite seconds of natural time. My eyes itch. I need to sleep. I don’t mind being tired or bored. I’m always bored. I sometimes wonder if I like the boredom because it makes time go more slowly.

  The swell of Julie McKendrick’s breasts rises in my mind and I go and lock myself in one of the bathrooms. I sink into the memories of her low-cut T-shirts and her shorts so short you can just see the curve of her arse. Sometimes I worry because I can’t remember her face so clearly even though it’s only been a month or so, but I concentrate on her breasts and her arse and her warm skin and drift into a fantasy of her mostly naked and wrapped around me, my fingers inside her and her breath hot in my ear telling me how much she likes it and what she wants to do to me, and then I’m in her mouth. I don’t know if Julie McKendrick has ever given a blow job, but by now she’s only part-Julie and part-porn from before that I’ve seen and laughed at with the boys from school and watched in throbbing wonder on my own. I figure it doesn’t matter much what I do with her in my imagination. She’s never going to know.

  Afterwards the tiredness is overwhelming and I head back to the dorm and close the door, then climb wearily onto my bed. I don’t get under the covers. The house is drowsy warm during the day, whatever the weather is like outside. I yawn and my eyes close. I listen to the patter of rain against the old glass and let it drown out my thoughts as I drift off. I always sleep after lunch. This is my routine and the others never disturb me. I don’t want to socialise anyway. What’s the point?

  There is no point, I think as I sink into the darkness. And then, just before I drown into nothing, They say it makes your eyes bleed.

  I’m so fast asleep when the gong wakes me that for a moment I think I’m back in school and a fire alarm is going. I tumble off the bed and stare, confused for a few moments until the house settles into place around me. I blink, not yet ready to move, and the gong falls silent. My mouth is dry and I’m still too sleepy to be hungry but I know I have to go to tea. Matron and the nurses might seem to vanish for most of the day, hidden in the walls of the house somewhere, but I know they still account for each child and, like ghosts, they watch us quietly without us really seeing them. I stretch and then head to the door. Halfway down the stairs, I’m greeted by the rest coming the other way, filled with excited chattering that I’m not awake enough to really absorb.

  ‘We’ve got to stay in our room!’ Will says. ‘We’ve got to stay there until tea!’ He flies past with Louis at his heels and my tiredness vanishes into their energy and my own confusion. The stairs thump with feet heading to dorms, and for a moment the house is alive. The nurses have appeared, standing at each landing and watching silently as we hurry past them. Their eyes follow each of us, mentally ticking us off. They don’t smile, though, or offer any words of encouragement. That’s not what the nurses are here for.

  Ashley is the last up the stairs and by the time he closes the dorm door behind him, the rest of us are at the window.

  ‘Look,’ Louis says, so close his breath fogs the glass. ‘New people. That’s what it is.’

  There are two black vans outside, pulled up right by the doors to the house. Someone’s standing on the steps under a big umbrella and we all know it’s
Matron. It was Matron who greeted us when we arrived. There had been more than two vans then, though. There had been a seemingly endless line of them, eight or nine stretching out back through the high electric solid gates at the end of the drive.

  ‘New kids,’ Will breathes. His eyes are wide. We’ve got used to our numbers going down, not up.

  ‘Can you see how many there are?’ Ashley asks, touching the glass with fingers green-streaked from the coloured pens. Even he is intrigued. Although the others find activities to fill their afternoons, they’re all as bored as I am.

  ‘Not many, by the looks of it,’ I say. Below, the door of one van slides back, but Matron has stepped forward with her umbrella and it’s blocking our limited view.

  ‘I wonder where they’ve come from?’ Louis asks, already thinking of his useless data survey.

  ‘They’ll be getting the talk in a minute, I guess,’ Will says. ‘Like we did.’

  His legs had been stiff when he climbed down from the van. The uniformed men who’d dragged him away from his screaming mother and strapped him into his seat had injected him with something as they sped away, and much of the trip passed in a haze. He hadn’t slept but neither had he felt like talking. For a while he thought he might be having a bad dream, but then the drug slowly wore off and although there were no windows to see out through, at one point he could feel the thrum of a bigger engine and the tilt of waves beneath them before the van started up again and cooler, fresher air crept in through the gaps around the door. He asked questions then but the men didn’t answer him, staring ahead as if he wasn’t there. In the end he gave up.

  The men didn’t climb down with him from the van, and as soon as he stood blinking on the ground, the door slid shut and they drove away, leaving him in the shadow of the overbearing manor house. More vans pulled up behind; three kids stepped down from the next one and he wondered if his own face matched the masks of nervousness they wore. In front of them a woman in a starched white uniform watched from the steps, and when the last van was unloaded, she led them inside.

  They gathered in the dining room, fifteen or so refugees with no suitcases and only the clothes they’d been taken in, a mishmash of youth and styles. The woman at the front of the room waited patiently as the nurses handed out cups of orange squash which they all drank and then she called them to silence.

  ‘I think there’s been a mistake,’ a boy beside him said. ‘My results must have got mixed up.’ He was maybe thirteen, geeky and wearing an oversized black T-shirt with some sci-fi shit on the front. His name turned out to be Henry and he would be the first of them to be taken in the night. No mistakes made there. His voice trembled as he tried to sound confident but he just sounded scared. Someone at the back snickered and the rest joined in, Toby included. Eyes flashed looks at each other and sudden bonds were formed, even though on the inside they were all thinking exactly what Henry had said aloud.

  ‘You will call me Matron,’ the woman said, ignoring Henry’s plaintive statement. ‘You are here because your blood tests have shown the Defective gene to be active. You are Defectives. Do I have to explain what that means?’

  Her voice was neither kind nor unkind, exactly matching her neutral face and expression. Another titter of nervous laughter rippled through her audience. They all knew what it meant even if they couldn’t believe it had happened to them. Toby had never known anyone test positive. Positives were so rare these days, that’s what his mum had always said. They never happened to anyone you actually knew. Like plane crashes.

  Matron was still talking. ‘This is your home now. You will be provided with clothes and food and activities to enjoy. You may play in the grounds of the house should you wish to do so. You will have some chores as you would at home and a rota in the hall outside this room will give you your allocations. You will change your bedsheets once a week. Your top sheet will go to the bottom and the bottom sheet should be put in the laundry sack provided. You will also continue with your studies every morning.’

  ‘Fuck no,’ someone said loudly. More laughter. Toby looked at the speaker, whose eyes shone. He had none of Henry’s nervousness, an arrogant swagger visible even in the way he simply stood. There were cigarettes in the back pocket of his jeans. Toby hadn’t seen the symbol shaved into his hair then, but Jake was already staking his claim as top dog in this ragamuffin collection of doomed youth.

  ‘The nurses and I will not – unless necessary – interfere with your time. It is our role to make sure you are cared for and comfortable. We will keep you in the best health possible while we can.’

  While we can.

  The tittering died as a surreal reality began to creep into the gaps around them. It wasn’t panic – and that was the first time Toby wondered if maybe there had been something in the orange juice to keep them calm – just a touch of surf washing in from the ocean of dread that suddenly lay before them.

  Four

  ‘What’s your name?’ Louis asks.

  ‘How old are you?’ Will, once again cross-legged on his bed. ‘You look older than Toby.’

  The new boy is an infiltrator in the calm of Dorm 4. He’s pale, but his eyes and hair are dark and his mouth is set in such a tight frown that his jaw, already square, looks more angular than it actually is. Clothes are laid out on the bed – jeans, T-shirts, hoodies. All the right size. Everyone is measured and weighed on arrival at the house. The nurses have been busy today.

  ‘Tom.’ The new boy speaks from between thin lips. ‘I’m seventeen.’ His eyes darken in the pause. ‘And a half.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Louis says.

  There is a moment of silence, broken only by the patter of heavy rain outside as we take this in. I can understand the boy’s bitterness now and my stomach tightens slightly. If it hasn’t happened by eighteen then it’s not going to happen. We’re all unlucky, but Tom is unlucky with a kick in the balls thrown in.

  ‘Tell us about the others,’ Ashley says. He’s leaning on the radiator, not messing up his neatly made bed by sitting on it.

  ‘Six more months.’ Tom doesn’t look at them but stares at the unfamiliar clothes that are now his. ‘That’s all I had to get through. Six fucking months.’

  ‘Shit happens.’ It’s the first thing I’ve said. I don’t like Tom. I don’t know him, but I don’t like him. What if his arrival breaks our streak? It’s illogical, but the fear is there regardless. Dorm 4 is no longer the same as it was this morning. Tom has arrived like a fracture through stone.

  ‘Yeah, tell us about the others,’ Louis says.

  ‘You know what they call this place, don’t you?’ At last Tom looks up. ‘The Death House.’

  ‘Who gives a shit what they call it?’ I say. ‘It’s home now.’ I’m bristling slightly. We’ve all learned to manage our fear – to live with it. Now we have to manage Tom’s.

  ‘That’s what they call it in London. Not just this house. All the houses.’

  ‘So you’re from London, then?’ Louis’ eyes have lit up as he pulls a small notebook from his pocket and scribbles in it. ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Like it matters.’ Sour, downturned mouth.

  ‘What about the others?’ Will is the third to ask the question. We’re not intentionally unkind people, but there is no point in sympathy. Sympathy is something you give someone worse off than yourself. Here, we’re all in the shit. It’s a level playing field. And at least Tom got to seventeen and a half.

  ‘Just a girl,’ Tom says. ‘She seems okay.’ His eyes slide to one side.

  ‘A girl?’ Will says. ‘It doesn’t get a lot of girls.’ His face scrunches slightly. ‘I wonder if it makes their eyes bleed, too.’

  Louis giggles at this, or perhaps at Tom’s shocked expression, and I can’t decide if Will said it on purpose to freak the new boy out. Cruel humour, but funny.

  ‘Let’s get back to our game,’ Louis says and Will
smiles. The novelty of the stranger is wearing off and Tom’s not going anywhere. There’ll be plenty of time to get to know him, and if there isn’t, then what’s the point in trying?

  ‘Which way do the horses go again?’

  ‘They’re knights, not horses, and they move in an L shape. Two and one.’ Louis’ still explaining it as the dorm door closes behind them.

  ‘I’m going back to the art room.’ Ashley pushes away from the radiator and picks up his Bible from the top of a wooden chest of drawers. Even he, with all his prim Christian charity, doesn’t offer to show Tom around the house.

  And then there were two.

  ‘You’re Toby, I take it,’ Tom says. I close my eyes. I don’t want to talk. I don’t really want to go back to sleep either, but it’s preferable. I’m going to have to get used to Tom, but I’ll do it in my own time.

  ‘You’re older than the others,’ Tom tries again. I say nothing. I think about how I’d hoped to be friends with Jake so I’d have someone my own age to dick around with, and now Tom’s here and I’m shutting him out. But Tom isn’t one of us. Not yet, at any rate. Jake, for all his assholery, is. Tom is older than me too. I’m going to have to make sure I keep my place as the boss of Dorm 4. Despite my calm stillness on the bed, the new arrivals have disturbed me.

  Tom doesn’t speak again but lets out a frustrated too-loud sigh, and then the drawers scrape and slide as he puts the clothes away. He’s settling in. He has no choice.